THE FBI’S FORGOTTEN CRIMINAL RECORD
The FBI has a long record of both deceit and incompetence. Five years ago, Americans learned that the FBI was teaching its agents that “the FBI has the ability to bend or suspend the law to impinge on the freedom of others.” This has practically been the Bureau’s motif since its creation in 1908.
The bureau was small potatoes until Woodrow Wilson dragged the United States into World War I. In one fell swoop, the number of dangerous Americans increased by perhaps twentyfold.
The Espionage Act of 1917 made it easy to jail anyone who criticized the war or the government. In September 1918, the bureau …
seized more than 50,000 suspected draft dodgers off the streets and out of the restaurants of New York, Newark, and Jersey City. …
the vast majority of young men who had been arrested turned out to be innocent.
In January 1920, … the “Palmer Raids” … Nearly 10,000 suspected Reds and radicals were seized. … Attorney General Mitchell Palmer sought to use the massive roundups to propel his presidential candidacy. The operation took a drubbing, however, after an insolent judge demanded that the Justice Department provide evidence for why people had been arrested. Federal judge George Anderson complained that the government had created a “spy system” that “
destroys trust and confidence and propagates hate. …”
After … the Palmer raids, … The bureau targeted “senators whom the Attorney General saw as threats to America … breaking into their offices and homes, intercepting their mail, and tapping their telephones,” … The chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was illegally targeted because the bureau feared he might support diplomatic recognition of Soviet Russia. …
The FBI tapped the home telephone of a Supreme Court clerk, and at least one Supreme Court Justice feared the FBI had bugged the conference room where justices privately discussed cases. In 1945, President Harry Truman wrote in his diary, “We want no Gestapo or Secret Police. FBI is tending in that direction…. This must stop.” …
The bureau’s power soared after Congress passed the Internal Security Act of 1950 … Hoover compiled a list of more than 20,000 “potentially or actually dangerous” Americans who could be seized and locked away at the president’s command. Hoover specified that “
the hearing procedure [for detentions] will not be bound by the rules of evidence.” “Congress secretly financed the creation of six of these [detention] camps in the 1950s,” ...
From 1956 through 1971
, the FBI’s COINTELPRO program conducted thousands of covert operations to incite street warfare between violent groups, to get people fired, to portray innocent people as government informants, and to cripple or destroy left-wing, black, communist, white racist, and anti-war organizations. FBI agents also busied themselves
forging “poison pen” letters to wreck activists’ marriages. The FBI set up a Ghetto Informant Program … that had 7,402 informants …
it even worked to expose and
discredit … “Young Men’s Christian Association and Boy Scouts,” as a 1976 Senate report noted. … and harass protesters partly because of its “
belief that dissident speech and association should be prevented …” …
COINTELPRO was exposed only after a handful of activists burglarized an FBI office in a Philadelphia suburb, seized FBI files, and leaked the damning documents to the media. …
April 19, 1993 … its agents used 54-ton tanks to smash into the Branch Davidians’ sprawling, ramshackle home near Waco, Texas. The tanks
intentionally collapsed 25 percent of the building on top of the huddled residents. … the
FBI pumped the building full of CS gas (banned for use on enemy soldiers by a chemical-weapons treaty), a fire ignited that left
80 children, women, and men dead. …
FBI agents had stopped firetrucks … Six years after the assault, news leaked that
the FBI had fired incendiary tear-gas cartridges into the Davidians’ home prior to the fire’s erupting. … the FBI brazenly lied about what it did at Waco …
The FBI has long relied on entrapment … The FBI Academy taught agents that subjects of FBI investigations “have forfeited their right to the truth.” …
In the Liberty City 7 case in Florida,
FBI [provocateurs] planted the notion of blowing up government buildings. …a federal judge concluded that the government “came up with the crime, provided the means, and removed all relevant obstacles” in order to make a “terrorist” out of a man “whose buffoonery is positively Shakespearean in scope.” …
The
FBI bankrolled a right-wing New Jersey blogger and radio host for five years prior to his 2009 arrest for threatening federal judges. … how many bloggers, talk-show hosts, or activists the FBI is currently financing. …